Guides/Mining/Sand Mining

Gems (and coal) are acquired when ore stones in a Mine are broken (by being used in 7 workloads). The size of the gem is random. There is some evidence to suggest that when more ore stones are broken in the same set and/or workload, the gem sizes on average tend to be larger; however, it's still perfectly possible to pull a Huge gem without exploiting this. Sand mines are thus valuable for gem mining, as it's easy to plan in such a way as to break 5+ nodes at once (assuming there are 5 different colors present in the field).

Below are some step-by-step guides for how to get the most gems per workload for various workload configurations.

Five Colors - Alternate Method

Using the theory that gem size is tied to the number of stones broken in a single workload (as opposed to the number of total stones broken in a field), the above can be simplified to do a little less work and still get the big break that will be producing most of the big gems.

Refer to the above image.

First, choose one of the duplicate-colored stones to ignore completely. Here we'll choose B-2. Then pick one of the stones in the remaining pair (say, A-1) to be your starter stone. Make any valid 3-stone workload starting with your starter stone, and immediately follow that with the workload consisting of the remaining 3 stones. There are exactly 6 sets of these pairs of workloads. Do them all.

A-1, C, D

A-2, B-1, E

A-1, C, B-1

A-2, D, E

A-1, C, E

A-2, D, B-1

A-1, D, B-1

A-2, C, E

A-1, D, E

A-2, C, B-1

A-1, B-1, E

A-2, C, D

And finally choose a 5-stone workload (either A-1 or A-2 in addition to B-1, C, D, and E).

The same process can be applied to 6- and 7-color fields. Make 6 sets of complementary pairs of workloads, and then one big one to break them all.

Five Colors - (1 Triple, 4 Single)

A triple and five single colours allows us to break 5 stones, which can be done all at once.